I’m looking forward to this month on Necessary Fiction, and I’m grateful to Steve Himmer for offering me the opportunity to be here. I have no idea what I’ll do with it. The title of the journal alone is deeply intimidating. I’m not sure I’ve written a necessary fiction in my life. Most of what I’ve written has been absolutely unnecessary. But I’m happy to share some of that with you.

My plan for what to do with the month here has changed five times. I hope to share some of my own writing, and to take some work out of context and re-present it here. I love the calm of this interface, and I wonder, for instance, how some work that is normally presented in a more hypermediated context might look here in the zen space of simple text. Hypertext without links, generated poetry and fiction presented as static, writerly text, kinetic poetry without movement. So I might do some of that.

I’ll probably give you a little tour of my writing career, such as it is or if you can call it that — stretching back to the time when I was more committed to the page and less to the digital media and then tracking my fall into the network.

For most of my recent adult life, I’ve worn a few different hats. I started out as a fiction writer, and luckily I still find some time to do a bit of that. At some point along the way, I became deeply involved in the community of electronic literature, and helped to start the Electronic Literature Organization. I’m not sure how to best describe what I’ve done with that. Community organizing? Institutionalizing? I’ve spent a lot of time trying to help develop what was once considered a very marginal practice of making fiction, poetry, and other kinds of poetic practices specific to the writing and reading environments of the computer and network into a field comprehensible to the academic world and other cultural institutions. This is both more exciting and more quotidian than it sounds. I have done a lot of editing, and putting together events, and databases, and grant applications, and committees. My god, what have I done to my life? I started out as a fiction writer, and woke up one morning to find myself a travel agent, or database developer, or accountant, or negotiator. At least I didn’t turn into a cockroach. But I see networks like the Electronic Literature Organization, and more recently, the European ELMCIP Project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation and Practice) as vital to making the creative world I inhabit and play in possible. This work has also provided me with the friendships I most value, and enabled me to collaborate with some fascinating writers and artists.

My other hat is that of a teacher and researcher in the loosely defined arena of “Digital Culture.” I do my best to teach and write about the textual artifacts and practices of digital culture, particularly those that have some literary intent. Storytelling and poetics are changing as the environment in which we create is changing. As the ways that we write, as the space and media we write in and with morph, as the nature of our language and thought processes themselves gradually drift into becoming something other than what they once were, the nature, purpose, and processes of literary culture are going to change. I see the experiments of contemporary electronic literature as speculative postcards from the imminent horizon. Most of the work that people are doing in e-lit now will be forgotten very soon. But I think it is important to notice and carefully study now, while new forms and genres, and collaborative interdisciplinary practices are still in the process of becoming.

Anyway — that’s my shtick at the University of Bergen in Norway.

I’ll also try to send you on a few excursions into some of the corners of electronic literature I find fascinating and direct you to the work of some of the best writers working in this space.

I should also mention be on the road a lot of this month. I’m going to be in Paris next week, and also in Copenhagen, Providence, and Philadelphia before the end of the month. I’m not sure if these trips will have any effect on what I do or don’t do here, but they might. I’ll plan to at least send you some links to French writers’ work, from the banks of the Seine. I’ll be doing some readings at Brown University on Halloween, and Kelly Writer’s House in Philadelphia on Nov. 1, for the “Three Rails Live” tour with Roderick Coover and Nick Montfort. So if you’re in Providence or Philadelphia, come out be a necessary reader.

But first, this week I’ll first post an old story “Hands” that I wrote back in the mid-1990s when I was a student in the MA program in fiction writing at Illinois State University. The story emerged from a specific challenge from David Foster Wallace, who was my teacher at the time. Wallace thought I was spending too much time and effort reproducing the cosmetic alchemy and trickery of metafictional postmodernism while avoiding the material of actual human emotion. Do something hard, he said. Write about human feeling. Write a story about a kid whose rabbit dies.

This story was published in The Unknown, an Anthology, published by Spineless Books. First published in 2001, the book is currently out of print, but Spineless publisher William Gillespie is putting together a new edition that will come out in 2012.

Later during the week, I’ll post some scenes from the collaborative hypertext novel The Unknown that Dirk Stratton, William Gillespie, and I wrote along with contributions by others including Frank Marquardt in 1998-2000. The Unknown is a hypertext novel about a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. It was originally intended as a publicity stunt for the anthology but then took on a life of its own and grew to hyperbolic, monstrous proportions. It was, as they say, a ton of fun. It’s how I ended up working in this field at all.

I look forward to sharing this month with you.